In the course of research for my current book, I’ve been reading an essay, a screed really, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1916 by Randolph Bourne. Something he wrote struck me, not for my work, but in light of all the discussions this week concerning the election and expectations about who would vote–about…
Throughout this seemingly endless electoral campaign, most Americans were told more than they ever wanted to know about the deficiencies of the two major-party candidates for the presidency. (I say “most Americans” because some of our friends and neighbors somehow managed to remain uninformed, under-informed, and undecided into the last days of the campaign; so…
Members of the English Department at Queensborough Community College asked me to share this open letter with the wider AAUP and faculty communities. A letter from one individual member of the department can be found here: Dear President Call, This is an open letter written on behalf of the 22 fulltime English Professors who voted…
In an open letter published this afternoon, Associate Professor of English at the CUNY campus Queensborough Community College Susan Jacobowitz describes better than I can the QCC situation that has been unfolding since September. The latest complication was a vote, just before Hurricane Sandy, by the members of the English Department to remove their Chair…
This is a guest post by Steve Harris, a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science who has taught at Saint Louis University for twenty years. He recently became president of the SLU chapter of AAUP. Father Lawrence Biondi, president of Saint Louis University, is widely recognized, off and on campus, as having constructed, over the…
It certainly wasn’t Obama’s education policies that led me to support him. Between Obama and the Republicans there is little daylight. Both sides of our “great” political divide have fallen under the spell of the education “reformers,” the corporatists who want to wrest control of education (and education dollars) from the public sector, making it…
Dr. Brian C. Mitchell is the retired president of Bucknell University and former president of Washington & Jefferson College. He is the president of Brian Mitchell Associates and director of the Edvance Foundation. He can be reached at: bmitchell@edvancefoundation.org A great number of us within the higher ed community are watching with interest the developments in…
The following is a statement to the City Colleges of Chicago Board of Trustees meeting on Nov. 1 by Sheldon Liebman of Wright College.
A powerful letter from a teacher in North Carolina appeared recently on Diane Ravitch’s blog. Many of us who work in higher education, when we read it, wring our hands and think, “There but for the grace of God go I.” But it might be that we should not be sending to know for whom…
At the AAUP Shared Governance Conference this past weekend, I listened to quite a few panelists talk about the importance of the Faculty Senate as a vehicle for shared governance in our colleges and universities. I won’t go into detail on the panels right now, only saying that I hope to convince many of those…